Unless you have owned a real Robotron machine, the world has been playing Robotron: 2084 via MAME since the mid-90s.

And that experience has been a slow evolution with varying gameplay experience results.

Which version you enjoy is totally up to you, being aware that MAME can come quite close to emulating the live Robotron experience but can never exactly create a live arcade experience…..mainly due to the inadequacies of the USB interface which can never take in as many controller inputs as a real Williams Electronics Interface PCB.

MAME version 106 was the standard for many years and the staple version used for Twin Galaxies record submissions.

MAME version 145 saw Sean Riddle the MAME Developer begin an exploration that ended in a complete rewrite of the Williams CPU and Blitter/video processing code

MAME 148 (which took til MAME 153 to have MAMEDEV publish Sean’s work) saw the end of the rewrite which created the most accurate emulation code but the final gameplay nuances are left as an open-ended experience for the player where the blitter has to be “hedged” to offset the inadequacies of PC USB inputs.

Which one you enjoy is totally up to the player’s opinion and desire on how difficult the gameplay experience is desired to be.

1997-2005ish- Up to MAME 95 (unsurvivable much like the original Digital Eclipse Williams compilation)

2005ish- MAME 96 (First Robo work done by Aaron Giles)

2006ish- MAME 106 (not good, game is fast, Twin Galaxies adopted this version so many have played it)

NOTE- These compiles are 32-bit so they will work on either 64-bit or 32-bit PCs

Why does Robotron require a tuning adjustment for MAME?

Per Sean Riddle (Feb 2015)- I’ve been lurking on the MESS board a lot. I see the developers talking about underlying issues in the emulation core that cause problems like the one that you are fixing with your multiplier. Until they have low-level emulation of everything, you will probably need a multiplier.

What is modified to create these compiled versions of MAME tuned for Robotron gameplay

After all this talk about MAME, what you’ll find is: The best way to play Robotron is via a JROK FPGA Multi-Williams PCB. They run about $225 and the 2015 version has an easy USB interface to allow quick loading of romsets. The pcb allows 2 robo romsets at a time, and 2 CMOS choices per romset for dual configuration of settings/high score tables. The JROK allows for VGA (LCD) or CGA (Arcade) video output and use a standard Jamma harness configuration.

To install one of the romsets above on the 2015 JROK-

Get a USB drive formatted in FAT32

Create a robotron folder

Unzip the desired romset into the folder

Plug the USB drive into the JROK pcb

Load the romset from the JROK software menu

Then the Robotron rom slot will fire up the romset you chose. Easy as that!